Nonlocal effects in effective-medium response of nanolayered metamaterials

The authors analyze electromagnetic modes in multilayered nanocomposites and demonstrate that the response of a majority of realistic layered structures is strongly affected by the nonlocal effects originating from strong field oscillations across the system, and is not described by conventional effective-medium theories. They develop the analytical description of the relevant phenomena and confirm their results with numerical solutions of Maxwell equations. Finally, the authors use the developed formalism to demonstrate that multilayered plasmonic nanostructures support high-index volume modes, confined to deep subwavelength areas, opening a wide class of applications in nanoscale light management. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physics.